On a zebra crossing one November night, Lynsey Grant saved my mother’s life. The paramedic was on secondment with the London Air Ambulance when she was dispatched across London to treat a woman who had been run over while crossing the road on her way home from work. The casualty was not expected to survive. Eighteen months on, thanks to the skills of Grant and her team she is home from hospital – disabled but, against all the odds, alive.
It’s a night Grant remembers with emotion, despite the myriad patients she has helped since then. “You can deal with really traumatic cases, but sometimes the things that upset you aren’t what you expect – it might be an elderly lady who has been assaulted or someone who is so grateful it really moves you,” she says. “When you get to the scene you are in clinical mode and don’t have time to think too much about the person lying there, but then later you might see their shoes on the road or a handbag with a make-up case inside and it really gets you that that was someone’s son or wife who got up that morning with no idea of what was about to happen to them. However many incidents you attend you never lose the sense of the human element.”
Grant gave no thought to a medical career as a child. Her ambition, to the horror of her private all-girls school careers adviser, was to be a lorry driver. She studied reception and tourism at college merely to buy time until she was 21 and could qualify for her HGV licence, then she hit the road in transcontinental trucks, gaining an additional licence for truck racing along the way.
“This lasted six years and then, corny as it sounds, I decided I wanted to do something that made a difference,” she says. “Plus I started to get road rage, and road rage in a huge truck isn’t good.”
She took a night course in human biology and realised that medicine enthused her. “I’m an impatient person and I didn’t want to train for seven years to be a doctor, so I applied to be an ambulance technician, which involved a 16-week course in patient assessment and life-saving skills, and four weeks’ on-the-job training with a mentor,” she says. “The first job I was called out on was somebody with suspected meningitis. Back then, ambulances were kept on chargers and I tried to drive off with it still plugged in.”
After four years as a technician she applied to be a paramedic, a promotion that required six weeks at an NHS training centre and four weeks of work experience in hospital theatres and A&E departments. Now she divides herself into three: a third of her role is as a community resuscitation training officer, teaching schools and businesses how to use defibrillators and perform CPR; on other shifts she works as a dispatcher in the control room where emergency calls come in. “Every call generates a case number and if I see on my screen that someone has, say, fallen downstairs and is unconscious, I tap into the call-handler’s extension, interrogate the caller and decide whether a trauma team is needed as well as an ambulance,” she says. “It can be horrendous making that decision but you get a gut feeling for what’s needed.”
Thirdly, Grant works shifts for the London Air Ambulance, a charitable organisation that deals with severe trauma cases. By day the teams are borne by helicopter; at night by car, which the duty paramedic will drive themselves while the accompanying doctor navigates. “On air ambulance jobs, we’re not told what kind of incident we’re being called out to, unless it’s a stabbing and we need protective vests, so that we concentrate on the driving,” she says. “Ordinary ambulance paramedics are dispatched from the nearest resource so it’s not too far, whereas the air ambulance covers everywhere within the M25 so we might have to cross the length of London to reach an emergency.”
Despite 13 years in the job, there is often apprehension when a call comes in. “You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t feel it, and complacency would be dangerous,” she says. “The incident you are told you are going to can be very different to what you find, and each day is a journey into the unknown. You can go from someone who’s fallen out of bed and just needs helping up to someone who’s jumped in front of a train. You might be delivering a baby or trying to calm a mental health patient. What’s disheartening is when people simply use us as a taxi service.”
It’s the job’s unpredictability that Grant loves, plus the knowledge thatit can mean the difference between life and death. “It’s always upsetting when patients don’t make it,” she says. “When you start out you do sometimes feel guilty that you couldn’t do more, but the team talks over each job together afterwards. That’s the way we debrief.”
Would-be paramedics have to secure a place on a training course with an ambulance service trust and/or graduate with an approved university degree in paramedic science. A national shortage of paramedics means that applicants with the right credentials will have a menu of vacancies to choose from. The flip side is that the shortage is, in part, caused by a lack of training opportunities.
Equally vital qualifications are diplomacy, compassion and sense of humour. “Humour is how we cope with really difficult situations,” Grant says. “Empathy is essential because you might have to deal with someone who hasn’t got much medically wrong, but who is highly anxious. And you need a cool head because it’s the job of a paramedic to manage a scene. Doctors have more training but they don’t have the experience of traumatic roadside injuries before the patient has been treated and stabilised.”
Above all, paramedics must be adaptable. They might have to control a crowd, brave a bomb site, navigate a heavy vehicle through a city rush hour, or face a murder victim. Grant has twice been assaulted by patients she has tried to treat. “You have to be a jack of all trades,” she says, “because you don’t know what each day will hold. That’s one of the things I most love about the job.”